By Eva Ramirez-Flores, Data Specialist, UNC Environmental Finance Center
The Climate Resilience Dashboard is an online resource designed to assist utilities nationwide with assessing their vulnerability to climate hazards. The user-friendly, interactive dashboard may be the first step in creating effective climate resilience strategies.
What is climate resilience?
A utility’s climate resilience describes its ability to plan for and respond to climate-related hazards in the communities it serves. Events such as floods, hurricanes, and wildfires pose a significant risk to water infrastructure, impacting a utility’s ability to provide safe drinking water to its customers. Given that climate change will only exacerbate the frequency and severity of such events, utilities should consider developing plans for mitigating their impacts and protecting their community’s water.
How can utilities assess their climate resilience?
Luckily, there are several resources available online that can help utilities identify environmental hazards they are likely to face and better understand their community’s resilience, such as the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s (FEMA) National Risk Index (NRI), the Climate and Economic Justice Screening Tool (CEJST), and Massachusetts Institute of Technology‘s (MIT) System for the Triage of Risks from Environmental and Socio-economic Stressors (STRESS). These resources provide a treasure trove of relevant data nationwide but may require significant time for communities to explore thoroughly. The UNC EFC has leveraged these resources to create the user-friendly Climate Resilience Dashboard geared explicitly towards utilities and their customers.
How does the Climate Resilience Dashboard work?
The Climate Resilience Dashboard combines indicators from the NRI, CEJST, and STRESS tools to facilitate initial climate risk assessments through benchmarking and spatial analysis. With the benchmarking feature, utilities can review their scores on more than forty climate resilience indicators. The indicators are divided into six categories: economic, climate and water, environmental hazards, expected annual loss, social vulnerability, and community resilience. The dashboard groups utilities by service population and calculates each group’s median, average, and max indicator scores. This allows utilities to assess their performance against their service population group and state’s performance, which helps with identifying climate resilience challenges. After identifying their community’s challenges, utilities can spatially analyze their risks at the tract level in the risk exposures map.
By exploring the Climate Resilience Dashboard, utilities can quickly gain insight into their community and the obstacles they are up against. This information can then help in shaping effective climate resilience strategies. Dive into the Climate Resilience Dashboard today!
Need technical assistance? The UNC Environmental Finance Center is here to help!
The Environmental Finance Center at UNC-CH offers free one-on-one technical assistance for small water systems. If you are interested in our support, fill out our Technical Assistance Request Form or contact us at efc@sog.unc.edu.